failure

The cloud backlash

There's no doubt that the recent "partial failure" of the Amazon Web Services cloud computing platform is giving enterprises, service providers, and developers pause--and will continue to do so for months to come. Amazon called the outage "partial" and a "degradation," but it was a very big deal. A significant part of Amazon's flagship EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) was offline for a day, as were the related EBS (Elastic Block Store) and RDS (Relational Database Service) offerings. The failure affected only the northern Virginia data center ("US-East"), and the majority … Read more

The 25 worst-named tech products

Companies agonize over what to name a product, and we certainly recognize how difficult a process it is to come up with a good name.

Over the years, we've seen lots of good ones: the Palm Pilot, the Motorola Razr, TiVo, the Flip cam, are just a few.

But today we're not here to celebrate success. No, let us to rejoice in failure and admire some of the truly bad -- and, in some cases, truly awful -- names that have come along in the last 10 years or so, including the latest additions to the list: the Asus FonePad/PadFone, Grace Digital Ecoxgear Ecoxbt, I'm Watch, Nintendo Wii U, and Qi inductive charging. … Read more

Network, don't fail me now!

Everything in IT depends on the network.--and not just in an abstract, "need it occasionally" sort of way. The packets must flow for virtually every operation, every job, every transaction. Whenever packets drop, or links go down, we're disconnected and isolated. Information doesn't flow; apps don't work; users don't proceed. We need the network up and running, millisecond by millisecond, every millisecond of every day.

Our utter, urgent dependency won't lessen in the coming years. It will intensify--redoubling and redoubling again. Cisco calls its vision of the future "together." HP … Read more

Study: EMRs not always linked to better health care

The adoption of electronic medical records, or EMRs, in U.S. hospitals has improved the quality of care in only one of three areas studied, and even in that area, the gains are limited, according to new research by the nonprofit Rand published this week in the American Journal of Managed Care.

Researchers analyzed the quality of care at 2,021 hospitals between 2003 and 2007 across three conditions: pneumonia, heart attack, and heart failure. The number of hospitals using either basic or advanced EMRs grew from 24 percent in 2003 to 38 percent in 2006.

Not only did the … Read more

Get iCare Data Recovery software free

Most users never think about data-recovery software until they need it--like, say, after a corrupted hard drive has cost them years' worth of family photos.

Make like the Boy Scouts and be prepared: get a recovery tool now and keep it at the ready.

From now until December 25, iCare Data Recovery 4.0 is available absolutely free. Regular price: $69.95. To get it, follow the "Steps to get registered iCare for free" instructions, making sure to run the program as an administrator and then pasting in the provided code. (FYI, you must activate it before the … Read more

Amazon: Outage due to hardware not hackers

An outage that took down some of Amazon's European Web sites yesterday was caused by hardware error and not hackers, according to the company.

The online retailer's shopping sites in the U.K, France, Spain, and Germany were down for about half an hour starting around 9:15 p.m. GMT, leading to initial speculation that Amazon had been hit by hackers associated with the pro-WikiLeaks group Anonymous.

But in a statement released to Reuters, Amazon attributed the cause to hardware problems.

"The brief interruption to our European retail sites earlier today was due to hardware failure … Read more

Failure is an option

I recently discussed techniques for reviewing projects to improve their likelihood of success. Underlying this is the reality that projects do fail often, at a greater rate than we'd like to admit.

Some failures are spectacular. After spending tens or hundreds of millions of dollars over a period of years, nothing ever really works. The entire investment of time, money, energy, effort, and focus has to be completely written off. Those are the legends. The laughing stocks.

But it's a mistake to conflate failures and catastrophes. Most failures are mundane and much smaller scale. They result from changing … Read more

The decade's 30 biggest tech flops

First, an admission. We ran this same story last year with many of the same picks. At the time, several readers said we were not only wrong for running it, but were downright ignorant.

As elbrado67 so eloquently put it:

We still have another year left in the decade, I would expect more from a "tech" site to be scientifically correct. You start counting with "1," not "0." Despite popular belief on the news and everywhere else, the new "Millennium" started in 2001, not 2000. Please stop dumbing everything down.

Many others … Read more

Protecting your blind side in IT

I recently argued that everyone has a blind side. When people or organizations miss important threats or opportunities--ones that are perhaps obvious to you--it's easy to think badly of them, to assign blame. My goodness! Why ever could they not see that coming?! Idiots! But it's not simple to avoid being those idiots.

I've dealt with department managers with unimpressive budgets who truly "get it." And I've worked with international governments and captains of industry who wouldn't recognize a clue if it dressed up as Colonel Mustard and bludgeoned them with a lead pipe in the conservatory.

In my experience, truly incompetent individuals and outlandishly oafish organizations are the exception. What I usually find are intelligent, well-meaning folks who can't see what they're missing--not because they're stupid, lazy, or in any other meaningful way blameworthy--but because they're focused on other tasks and looking the other way.

Last week, I promised to share some techniques for dealing with the blind side. I wish I could say "Combine a pound of black beans, a quart of skepticism, three eggs, four product evaluations, and a dash of focus group feedback in a large mixing bowl; stir until creamy; pour into well-greased pan; and bake for an hour at 325 degrees." But it's not like that. Improving your perception and handling of things that are over the horizon, camouflaged, latent, or visible only in the "negative space" (i.e., what's missing rather than what's there)--those are skills to be learned, not recipes to be followed. Nevertheless, I've used these these techniques with excellent results:

Admit It, Move On People tend to be embarrassed by, thus defensive about, their blind spots, weaknesses, ulterior motives, errors, and failures. Ego drives us to pretend they don't exist. But when you're pretending something isn't a problem, it's hard to do much about it. So get over it. Accept that you have significant weaknesses, fears, and other assorted ugly bits--that there's an often large gap between where/what you are and where/what you want to be. Getting over shame and blame and getting your ego out of the way lets you get on with the real work. If it's not your ego in the way, help whoever's ego is in the way to get out of it.… Read more